10 Times Sci-Fi Classics Predicted the Future Totally Wrong

Science fiction has provided a way for people to imagine the future. A lot of the best sci-fi films of the past decades pictured what life would be like in the future. The movies asked what the world would look like in the 1980s. What about the 1990s? What about the 2000s? Well, now it's 2022. We have lived in the future. Most of the movies that were made during those years were completely wrong.

Many of these films were brilliant at predicting broader shifts in technology, culture, and politics, but the actual predictions about what the future would look like were often incorrect. Sometimes they were correct. Sometimes they were completely off base. Take a quick look at some of your favorite movies and see if they were incorrect about the future.

2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the best films of all time. There is a robot who murders people, a floating space baby, apes gone wild, and a light show. It is hard to go wrong with a decision to watch this movie. There is an accurate prediction of what the year 2001 would look like, but it is missing. We didn't have commercial space stations or computers at that time. America was still awash with Hummers, the first iPods, terrible pop culture, and Bush administration cronyism. It was not elegant and visually breathtaking. As prescient as the film was, it failed to anticipate that Americans would be less interested in space travel than they were in Survivor.

The Omega Man was made in 1971 and thought that by 1977 most of the world would be dead. The film imagines a scenario in which a plague kills off most of the population. Heston plays a scientist in Los Angeles who injects himself with an experimental vaccine that allows him to survive. L.A. is overrun by a cult of plague-addled Mutants who are trying to kill Heston.

1977 in America had some rough spots, but it wasn't that bad.

The movie was later made into a film called I Am Legend, which features a scene in which Will Smith kills his dog so it won't become a zombie.

Soylent Green is a movie starring Charlton Heston that predicts a world thrown off course by overpopulation, ecological disaster, and resource scarcity. Not a bad prediction.

The film's central conceit is that the world is so resource-starved that a mega-corporation named Soylent will feed people to each other. The film's shocking twist ending reveals that a ubiquitous food product called Soylent Green is actually created using the bodies of dead people. The film predicted that New York City would have 40 million people by the year 2022. I don't think we have met that threshold yet. We are not currently being fed by Soylent. To my knowledge...

The 1975 movie Rollerball predicted that wars wouldn't exist in the foreseeable future. I am not sure if there was a gladiatorial contest in which people kill each other in 2018? Wars are still happening.

Escape From New York predicted that America would be in trouble by 1997. The federal government was forced to convert the entire island of Manhattan into a maximum security prison in the movie. Kurt Russell plays Snake Plissken, a convict who is sent in to rescue the President when his plane crashes on the island.

When the film was made, it made sense to see America's favorite city as pessimistic. The 1970s were rough for New York. It was a time when muggings and murders were commonplace and Times Square was a place to watch porn, not take pictures with Disney characters. Things got better. New York was in better shape by 1997 than it was in prior decades, even though crime continued to be bad in the early 90's.

One of the best science fiction movies of all time is Ridley Scott's 1982 film, Blade Runner. Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a former cop and blade runner who hunts bio-engineered humanoids who are on the wrong side of the law. Scott's eye for detail creates a fully realized world, with flying cars and atmospheric urban landscapes. There is one problem, it is set in 2019. At that point, the closest thing to replicants we had was probably Amazon. As helpful as she is, she doesn't have the verbal talents to pull off Roy Batty's monologue, nor does she have the legs of the actress who plays him. We did not have flying cars.

The Running Man is a novel that was written by Steven King and is set in the year of 2017: America has become a brutal police state where violent, televised gameshows are the only thing that keep an otherwise unruly public in check. The Running Man is one of the battle Royales where Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an average Joe who is framed for murder and forced to go on a journey. The host enjoys toying with the players. There is bloodshed and fireworks.

We all agree that the year was bad, but it wasn't that bad. Unless you count Donald Trump's first year in office, we were not forced to watch a show where life and death were dictated by a raging narcissist.

Back to the Future is a movie that most of us have seen. The story is about a teenager who uses a flying car to travel back in time to the 1950s, where he dates his own mom. Back to the Future II is even weirder than the first film.

In 2015, the world has become so futuristic that there are flying cars, people dress in what look like rave outfits, and hoverboards are a thing. Thebutterfly effect causes everything to be messed up when they come back in the 80s. Marty's dad was killed by Biff. Biff is married to Marty's mother, who has had a lot of plastic surgery.

The movie is so weird that it has spawned an assortment of conspiracy theories, including that it predicted 9/11 and that it references the Kennedy assassination. I don't know about it, but the movie predicted that a rich blonde blowhard would make life difficult for everyone. Spot on!

Time Cop, starring martial arts guru Jean-Claude Van Damme, was made in 1994 and thought that police would be able to use time travel to solve crimes in ten years. Van Damme plays a D.C. Metro police officer who goes back in time to 1929 to check out the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression. He goes back and forth between 1994 and 2004. dumb things happen There is a reason for the Civil War to be involved. It is not a great movie. Cops can't time travel. They couldn't in 2004. Probably still can.

Another movie that got a lot of wrong is 2012'sRoland Emmerich. In three years, the world will come to a cartoonishly catastrophic end and John Cusack will be the only one to survive. In the film, a solar flare unnaturally heats the Earth's core, leading to an assortment of ecological calamities. The film does its best to be a thinking man's action movie, even though it is just an excuse to watch shit explode.

It didn't cause the world to end in 2012 despite being predicted for years. Yet. We should be concerned about climate change. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Moonfall is not an accurate reflection of things to come.

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